Transformed by the soul of Woolf

Producer Scott Rudin sprawls casually in a director’s chair, eyes darting between a monitor and the scene being played before him. We are in a London suburb on the banks of the Thames; a leafy walkway with glorious river views has been dressed to make it look as it did in 1923. A tall, forbidding, intense-looking woman with a big aquiline nose and faded auburn hair swept back into a severe bun walks alone, distractedly talking to herself, oblivious to the curious glances of passers-by.

“She’ll die!” the woman mumbles. “She’s going to die. That’s what’s going to happen. She’ll kill herself. She’ll kill herself over something that doesn’t matter.”

The woman is pale, her face bare of makeup. She wears stylish clothes carelessly: a straw hat perched on her head, a gray thigh-length cardigan over a floral print dress. Her brown shoes are scuffed, her silk stockings in terrible condition. As she speaks, she has the air of someone whose life is falling apart.

Director Stephen Daldry murmurs “Cut,” and this unrecognizable woman relaxes, drifts over to meet a visitor to the set and brightly says, “Hi!” It’s extraordinary. Even from a distance of 3 feet, even allowing that we have met before and even when she lapses cheerfully into her native Australian accent, it seems incredible that this could be Nicole Kidman. If you didn’t know, you couldn’t possibly guess.

But it is, of course. Kidman plays the distinguished English novelist Virginia Woolf in “The Hours,” a film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. “The Hours,” distributed by Paramount in North America and by Miramax elsewhere, attempts to trace Woolf’s creative process in writing her groundbreaking 1925 novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” her suicide 16 years later, and the stories of two fictional women in more recent eras who were influenced by Woolf’s life and work.

“Oh, I know,” Kidman says of her astonishing transformation. She starts to move a hand up toward her large prosthetic nose but thinks better of it. “Well, you really have to get inside this character. You need to feel different.”

She resumes her position for her walkway monologue and this time completes it to Daldry’s satisfaction. From his perch behind the monitor, Rudin is beaming. “I’d have to say things are going well,” he reflects. “After all, it’s like we’re making three little movies here.”

One sees what he means. Three separate visits to the set of “The Hours” between March and June last year would have left any visitor unfamiliar with Cunningham’s novel deeply puzzled about the story. The Virginia Woolf scenes were shot last, though one of them opens the film; it shows the novelist placing heavy stones into the pockets of her coat and walking into a river near her home.

One of the three stories in “The Hours” is contemporary and set in New York City. Its central character, played by Meryl Streep, is a middle-age woman, Clarissa (who shares a first name with Woolf’s heroine Mrs. Dalloway). It tracks a landmark day in her life, during which she buys flowers and plans a party for her old friend Richard (Ed Harris), a poet suffering from the ravages of AIDS.

The film’s third story takes place in 1951 Los Angeles, where Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a suburban housewife with a 6-year-old son, Richie, feels trapped by motherhood and by her marriage to Dan, (John C. Reilly), her dutiful, dull husband. Laura is reading “Mrs. Dalloway” and empathizes with its heroine, another woman whose life seems to be unraveling.

The emotional scene being shot during one of those earlier visits is set in Clarissa’s book-cluttered apartment, fashioned by production designer Maria Djurkovic on a sound stage at Pinewood Studios, about 20 miles west of London. This is the climax of the Clarissa story; it is the end of the day of the planned party (which never materialized) and she is left with rooms full of flowers and uneaten food.

Streep, Allison Janney, who plays her girlfriend Sally, and Claire Danes (her daughter Julia) are dressed in robes, ready for bed. “Yeah, it’s not a bad day when you go to work in your pajamas,” Danes wisecracks as she drifts off set between scenes. Streep takes her cue from the clothes she is wearing; between setups she curls up on a sofa and falls asleep.

The food, an important component of this scene, has been imported from London’s chic River Cafe: fresh salmon, fresh tuna, duck breasts and live crabs await consumption. The smell of the feast wafts under the noses of a frustrated crew, which is virtually salivating.

Ten days later and everything has changed. Shooting has shifted to an adjacent Pinewood sound stage, where Djurkovic has created Laura Brown’s suburban L.A. home, all blond wood, with a 14-inch Zenith television in the living room, and a bathroom in which turquoise is the predominant color. Little Richie’s bathroom boasts wallpaper with pictures of cowboys.

In Laura’s kitchen, Daldry and Julianne Moore are rehearsing a scene with Jack Rovello, the child actor playing Richie. It is Dan’s birthday, and Laura is trying ineptly to bake him a cake; together she and Richie must sift flour. Daldry kneels down beside the boy and explains in calm, patient tones how he wants the sifting done. He is accustomed to this tutoring approach; “Billy Elliot,” Daldry’s previous film and also his feature debut, also involved big roles for young, inexperienced actors.

“Stephen’s doing a great job,” says Moore, seating herself on Richie’s bed between takes. “This is a pretty massive undertaking, after all. But he has a great sense of the material. And I like the actors he’s chosen. You can tell a lot about a director by the people he chooses.”

Moore received Cunningham’s novel as a birthday gift three years ago. “I really loved it but never thought it was a movie. Then I met with Scott Rudin, who told me he loved it too. In meeting Scott, I realized he’d offered me a lot of work over the years, none of which I’d done. He showed me the script [by English playwright David Hare] and I was really impressed by it. David has stayed close to the tone of the book -- it’s a really faithful adaptation. And the next thing I knew, Scott got back to me to say Stephen wanted to meet me.”

After being cast as Laura, Moore decided to read Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” “It’s so surprising. It’s about moments of your life. Nothing is ever monumental. Baking a cake, buying flowers for a party -- that’s what our lives are made up with.”

Daldry agrees. “We think of Mrs. Dalloway as trivial and bourgeois. But you do sympathize with her.”

A reshoot required

Fast forward 18 months. It’s the prelude, at last, to the release of “The Hours,” and Daldry is musing about the long gestation of his film, which opens Dec. 27. He sits on a sofa in his office, which fittingly for a man so closely associated with the stage (he was artistic director at the prestigious Royal Court for five glittering years) is situated in the heart of London’s theater district, four floors above Shaftesbury Avenue.

Why the long delay? “There was a problem that required a reshoot,” he says flatly. “Originally, we hired an actress to play Laura as an older woman for some scenes late on in the film. There was nothing wrong with the actress, she was fine, but when we saw the footage, it was as if a new character was being introduced, so we decided to age Julianne and use her.”

Because Moore had other film commitments, she was unable to do the reshoot immediately, so it was scheduled for Sept. 13 last year, just two days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. “No one could fly,” Daldry shrugged. “We finally did it at Pinewood at the start of this year. And this was always a year-end film, anyway.”

He feels the wait was worth it. “Because we spent so much time with David on the script, we knew how [the three stories] would fit together, and that didn’t change in the cutting room. David writes women so sensitively.” Daldry smiles impishly. “He’s like an honorary woman.”

And women are absolutely crucial to the film, with three towering female roles at its center. Daldry is grateful his three lead actresses had stage experience. “We’d rehearse as if we were doing a play. I didn’t have to learn a new language. There was a level of mutuality in our approach to the work.”

Of Kidman, he says, “She’s a transforming actress. She isn’t just a movie star. She can really act. A transforming movie star is rare.” Daldry grins slyly at this point. “My relationship with her was entirely with her nose on. It became much easier to work like that. She was a new person, someone I can totally relate to. I was never dealing with Nicole the movie star, but Nicole the actress with a nose on. So when she took it off, I was like, ‘Hello, I’m Stephen.’ It’s as if one had to relate to two different people.”

He recalls the film’s opening scene, with Kidman submerging herself in the river. “You try telling her we’d use a stunt double,” Daldry says with a sigh. “She’s fearless. My big fear was drowning Nicole Kidman. I put frogmen in the water, but I had a stopwatch, and she was still under after two minutes.”

Through the process of working and reworking “The Hours,” his dealings with Paramount executives were harmonious. Of Rudin, a guiding force of the movie who was regularly on the set, he says: “He allowed me freedom and kept pushing the boundaries of what was possible. So now I can show the film, and say, ‘Like it or not, that’s what we meant. There’s no other version I can say is a director’s cut. What you see, that’s what we meant.”

While the film, made for a budget reported at a slim $21 million, looks certain to figure prominently in the coming awards season, can it find a mass audience? Daldry says it was screened for audiences in London and New York and its appeal was wider than expected. “Younger women and older men liked it as well as older women.”

He concedes it is a film for grown-ups. “I did find it remarkably upsetting. I was upset in the right way and in the right places -- that sense of the women feeling trapped, that feeling you’re going mad.

“I feel getting older is almost a process of trying to cope with grief. Not just people dying, but lost possibilities and lost moments. Those three women trying to break out of that cycle of grief, and risking everything to do it, I found incredibly distressing yet hopeful. I came out feeling great.”